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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

Operation Overlong Continues to Prepare the Perfect Killing Blow

It was 30 months between Pearl Harbor and the D-Day landings in Normandy, France, during World War II, in the heart of Nazi Germany's Fortress Europe. It has been 27 months since ISIL captured Mosul from Iraq.

Granted, we've been supporting offensives elsewhere in Iraq during the last year despite leaving the ultimate objective in Iraq in enemy hands.

But we had also been on the offensive elsewhere in Europe before going after the ultimate goal of landing in France to defeat the Nazi army.

When Kurdish Peshmerga, Iraqi army, and U.S.-led coalition forces move to liberate nearby Mosul, possibly within two weeks, Islamic State fighters will not abandon their prized city and quietly slink away as many in Washington have predicted, according to the Peshmerga’s top military officer.

“They will fight to the death,” said Gen. Jamal Mohammad Omer, Kurdish military chief of staff, in an exclusive interview with Defense One in his office Thursday.

Sure, the jihadis could rediscover the "we love death" attitude that has compensated for their lack of numbers, training, and equipment. When Iranian morale collapsed in 1988 during their war with Iraq, enough Iranians discovered the will to fight when Iraq made thrusts into Iran to convince Iraq to end that war while they held the edge rather than push for a bigger victory.

So ISIL could rediscover the will to fight.

But what are the reasons for this? Because Mosul is their prize city? If it is so prized, why isn't Mosul the de facto capital of their caliphate rather than Raqqa, Syria?

And there have been reports that ISIL has executed their fighters for running from other cities that were supposed to be held to the death. What makes ISIL's purported decision to fight to the death for Mosul more real than past orders to do so?

Now, let me be so bold as to suggest that the Iraqi Kurds have a motivation to say the fight will be hard. The harder taking Mosul appears to be, the more assistance the Kurds can get from America and other coalition partners.

With the caveat that morale can change during a campaign, I still expect the offensive to go more rapidly and easily than the Kurds say it will be.

Although it is also possible that ISIL just wants to increase our body count to make us pay a price for defeating them.

That said, the second point I want to make is that many in our capital think the offensive will be fairly easy? Is that the position of our military people in charge of facilitating the Iraqi offensive?

If that is so, why has Mosul been occupied by ISIL for 27 months now? Why haven't we helped organize a much more rapid counter-offensive to take Mosul from badly outnumbered defenders by now?

At the rate we are going, ISIL will be able to boast that their caliphate held out longer against the might of America than Nazi Germany managed!

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!